A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

2

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

3

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

4

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

31

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

32

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

41

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

42

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

43

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

57

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

75

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

76

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

77

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

78

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

79

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

80

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

81

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

84

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

85

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

86

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

87

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑

108

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley | RefcardPDF↑